


Monkey's Paw

by alicat54c



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Graphic Description, Swearing, because Remus see the world in an...interesting way, rating is because of Remus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:00:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26591059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicat54c/pseuds/alicat54c
Summary: Remus hacked through the jungle of the imagination, climbed the high tower of zombie monks, and hacked the paw from the eternal hindbrain ape itself. Now he can make any five changes in Thomas's mind that he wants!
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26





	Monkey's Paw

**Author's Note:**

  * For [parallelmonsoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/parallelmonsoon/gifts).



> Fill for Parallelmonsoon on the Joan Collective server
> 
> Join us, by filling out this survey to gain the first of many clues that will lead you to the discord! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PWPFHM5

…

Thomas sat on his couch, lips pressed to disguise his distaste, while Patton vomited up words of comfort, and Roman tried to beat Remus back into the corner with his sword. Remus pouted.

Once more, Remus’s fantastic, amazing, earth- shattering ideas were being cast off as irrelevant!

“Fuck all-a-ya’ll, ya’ll-a basic hoes!” Remus sunk out, while flipping the living room at large double birds.

If HE was running the brain, everything would be so much more fun and exciting! No more of those boring old poetry pieces only fit to stick to Grandma’s fridge.

And Remus knew just where to go to get his wish.

He sunk down further than the mind palace and the raceways of thought, down past the corpus callosum, till he was snuggled right inside the deepest levels of the Subconscious.

He rematerialized beside what appeared to be a three story high jungle, dense with foliage, which seemed to turn in his direction to watch him. No sound emanated from the greenery, not even when a breath of wind blew, ruffling the intrusive thought’s hair.

The jungle of the imagination was deep, and dark, and other adjectives that described Remus’s sex dungeon. And like said dungeon, the best way through was screaming with sharp objects.

Summoning his morningstar, Remus bellowed a battle cry and began hacking at the thick tree trunks and vines. A few clinging roots tripped him up, but a judicious application of violence fixed that. In no time at all, a Remus-sized hole was burrowing its way like a botfly through the foliage.

The leaves blocked the light entirely, plunging him into a green-y twilight. But Remus was used to living in the dark, so he pressed on. Finally, with a final swing, Remus struck daylight.

He burst like a pimple into a clearing. In front of him was the arched entrance to an ornate stone temple. He dashed to the entrance, expectantly scouting for all manner of chimerical beasts, but was sorely disappointed when one failed to appear.

“Ugg, boring!” He groaned, swinging his mace to smash the archway. It collapsed behind him as he continued into the temple.

Inside was a mausoleum of shuffling bodies. Ornate scripts carved into the walls, tracing branches of Thomas’s family tree back through time, though most of the names were worn and forgotten with age.

A decaying figure slowly lurched past Remus, wearing the stereotypical robe of a Fransciscan monk. 

Being Catholic, Thomas had come across more than a few renditions of Memento Mori from the monasteries of the dark ages. One such illustration showed a crowd of skeletal monks tending to their gardens and potted plants in the monastery, some moral about the deeds you sow in life providing fruit for the next generation.

The shambling corpses moving through the temple resembled those illustrations, only the monks had more rotting and withered flesh beneath their brown robes than bones. A few had embroidered name tags corresponding to the family tree carved into the wall, and even more were blank.

“Ugg, you guys are the worst zombie hoard,” Remus moaned. He tapped his mace against his shoulder. “Oh well, guess target practice is early today.”

Despite the zombie monks being somehow more boring in pieces than put together, Remus still made it a point to hunt down each one and splatter it across the floor. Dedication and thoroughness were supposed to be holy Catholic virtues, or whatever, right? He snapped his fingers over the final product, lighting the remains on fire for good measure.

Once the temple was cleared of un-life, Remus ascended the stairs of the one central tower. It spiraled around the inner wall of the narrow structure like a brain stem, so tightly that Remus kept hitting his knees and elbows on the walls. He fixed that by smashing a few extra windows into the stone as he went, heedless of the rubble.

The staircase opened up into a gold encrusted pavilion, with marble pillars and floors. In the center, a withered dusty mummy, the size of a small gorilla, sat wrapped in layers of orange silk.  
The mummy had the squashed skull of an ancient link connecting humanity to its evolutionary past, just too shy to be entirely called any recognizable species of monkey, though its features were distinctly simian. One mummified hand was stretched out, as if in offering, while the other was hidden away with the rest of its body under the layers of fabric.

Remus walked towards it, mace swinging idly. It took a chunk out of a support pillar, and scored scratches in the flat marble floor.

“There it is, the big kahuna, the eternal hindbrain monkey that runs this wackadoodle reality inside Tim-Tom’s brain!” Remus poked at the mummy’s shoulder. It tilted, body light as leather. “The ultimate ancestor and instincts, blah, blah, blah, I’m bored now.”

Pulling a dagger from his boot, Remus grabbed the mummified monkey’s paw, and began to saw away at the wrist. Ancient coagulated blood, more black than red, leaked from the wound, until with a CRACK like a shattering tree in winter, the bone gave, and Remus was up one disembodied limb.

“Ha!” He crowed waving the paw in triumph, blood splattering across the white floor and pavilion ceiling. “Now let’s see what horrible wishes I can make!”

Remus brandished the monkey’s paw, which slowly dripped black blood down his wrist and sleeves.

“I wish that Thomas listened to /me/ more!”

The monkey’s paw twitched, and the smallest finger jerked against the grain of its knuckles with a SNAP, and crumpled in a curled lump against the withered palm.

Remus brought the paw closer to his face, squinting as he examined it. “That’s it? Ripoff.” He tucked it into his sash. “Oh well, let’s see if it worked!”

Much like a roach motel in reverse, the cerebellum temple was much easier to exit than to enter. So, with only a twist of his wrist, the duke vanished with the monkey paw.

He appeared a blink later behind the TV of Thomas’s living room.

Time moved differently inside of the mind, so barely a moment had passed between his leaving on an adventure, and his return.

“What up, bitches! Your muse has arrived!”

Virgil glared at him from the corner by the stairs, while Patton worried the sleeves of his sweater around his neck. Logan adjusted his glasses with a sigh.

Thomas was still sitting on the couch, laptop perched on his knees. He looked up at the side’s arrival.

“Oh, Remus. Um. Hi.”

“Grab your asses, I’ve got the most wonderfully awful idea, that would knock the Grinch right outta Whoseville!” Remus crowed, jumping out from behind the TV. “We’re gonna reenact the greatest hits of the Jackass Franchise, all in one day!”

He waited for the telltale surge of music that marked his brother’s arrival, but none came.

“Heh, looks like Prince Ro-bro is a bit too tied up to butt in and ruin things!” He cackled.

“Who?” Thomas said, typing furiously on his laptop.

Remus waved a hand. “Eh, it’s no one important. Now, I think we should start with the dick in a mouse trap-“

“Um,” said Patton, nearly tugging his sweater free of its knot. “I don’t think that is the family friendly kind of video you want to have on your channel there, bud…”

Remus rolled his eyes, one hand patting his sash. “I wish Daddy-Killjoy was gone, so we could finally get some more adult content up in here!” SNAP.

A sound like TV static filled the room, but Remus didn’t pay it any mind, having already turned his attention back to Thomas.

“So, anyway, after that-“

“NO,” Came the doubled tones of Virgil’s voice. His face had nearly vanished under his hood, as he pulled the strings tight around his face.

Thomas drew back from his keyboard. “Um, do I really want to record myself doing that? I mean, what if I really hurt myself, and what kind of comments would people make about my junk….? We could get de-monetized!”

Remus made a sound like a backfiring car in his throat, and reached for his sash again. “I wish you couldn’t care less about what kind of comments the video will get!” SNAP.

“Remus, what are you-“ Static cut off the words before they could finish.

Remus glanced up just in time to see a few sparks of light in the corner pocket by the staircase fizzle out of existence. That was, hm. Like turning off a television. Eh, whatever, more fun things were at hand.

“So, let’s go already, Thomas! There’s a bunch of mouse traps under the sink-“

“I am going to have to figuratively ‘pump the brakes’ here, Remus.” Logan adjusted his glasses. “Were Thomas to utilize this idea, it would require much forethought and planning in order to be carried out safely-“

“I wish you would just shut up and let us get started!” SNAP.

This time, Remus watched as the side was fractured and split, his pieces fizzing out like so many tinder sparks on an old TV screen.

A high mania whined through his head like a zeppelin full of house flies. “That’ll keep the nerd busy for a while, right Thomas?” He looked around. “Thomas?”

Thomas was sitting on the couch, staring at his fingers. “What if I just bit through my finger, like a baby carrot?”

The digits wiggled. “No, no, even better! What if I ran out and bit someone else’s fingers off? Then held it for ransom?”

That sounded like a fantastic idea to Remus…but some lizard portion of his brain rebelled. “Sure, maybe later, but I really wanna get the video done now!”

Thomas cackled, his voice unable to reach the fevered pitch that Remus favored, but still making such an effort as to crack his vocal cords. “Oh, oh! But, we could go push those other actors down the stairs and into a massive meat grinder! Then the part would be mine!”

“And then you would get to learn how to be a prison bitch too, I guess.” Those ideas were neat, but Remus wanted Thomas to focus on HIM and HIS ideas.

“Ugh, where’s the nerd brigade when you actually want them?”

Thomas’s head snapped at an unnatural angle. “Who’re they? Never heard of them?”

Remus scowled. “You know, heart and brain matter duo in glasses? Grumper in a Jumper? Less fun version of me in primary colors?”

“Oh, are we playing a game? Me next! The headless screamer that surely doesn’t lives under my bed, the bodiless walker that doesn’t live in the closet-“

Remus stomped his foot. “Stop it! You know, your other sides?” 

“Other sides? Oh, you don’t mean-”

Suddenly Janus appeared, in the space previously occupied by Logan. He looked around, eyes frantic, hat askew. “Thomas?”

His eyes flew from one empty space to another around the room, finally landing on Remus. “What’s going on? What’s-”

Remus’s shoulders pulled up to his ears, like an angry vulture. “Janus, tell Thomas that he knows who the other sides are! Tell Thomas to stop lying!” SNAP

His hands flew to his sash. “Hey, no, wait! That wasn’t a wish!” He fished out the paw, only to find another finger mangled and broken.

Red eyes snapped up.

Janus’s mouth was stretched wide, the scaled half of his face opening well beyond the capacity of a normal human to show needle sharp fangs. His gloved hands were paused like a video half way to his throat, as if he were choking. The lack of sound echoed through the room.

Then the static started.

The side’s outline buzzed and skipped, as if two frames of movements were trying to play at the same time, jerking him back and forth through one pained instant. His body fractualized, and split, losing pixels with each jump, until only the barest hints of a figure remained.

Then even that was gone.

Remus’s fingers tensed against the wrist of the monkey’s paw. That was… No. Jan was fine. Janus was always fine. 

His eyes turned to look back at the couch. A man with his face, and bloodshot eyes colored purple with sleep deprivation grinned back, teeth glinting sharply.

“Thomas?”

The man on the couch stood, balanced and tense on the balls of his feet like a predator.

“Now whatever made you think that?” said his own voice.

Remus took a step back, ass hitting the screen of the TV. “Unless there’s a classic case of brain swap, or teleportation, then who else would you be?”

The person who was-and-wasn’t Thomas grinned. The expression listed to one side, showing off far too many teeth. “I guess this is a brain swap, in a way. If you count lobotomies as swapping.”

Remus took a step towards the blinds, still facing the other. Not-Thomas matched his step, circling the center of the room in mirrored tandem. “What do you mean? I would need at least a knitting needle to pick Thomas’s brain like that.”

The laugh matched Remus’s more closely this time, a high unkind guffaw of an accusation. “What do you think would happen when you started re-arranging the rooms in Thomas’s brain, huh? A tea party?”

Remus clutched the monkey’s paw so hard, his nails pierced the leathery skin. “I dunno, maybe it sent them into an orgy pit or-”

“They’re all GONE, you dumbass! You’re alone!” The figure’s eyes shined red. “Now the only thing left of Thomas is YOU!”

“What? No! You’re wrong! They’re all just, like, jacking off and can’t come to the brain right now, or- or something!”

The figure smiled, arms crossed to mirror the other’s. “Now, now, Remus. You’ve never been one for hiding the truth. Can’t imagine why you would start now.”

Remus threw himself back into the mindscape, intent on ripping his way through the mind palace until he found even one of the other sides. However, instead of landing in a replica of Thomas’s living room, he landed in a vast void of white emptiness.

“The fuck is this?” His voice echoed back against the walls of the nothingness, both dampened and heightened at the same time.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, fuckheads, come out!”

No reply.

He huffed. Shoving his hand into his sash, he pulled out the monkey’s paw, all of its fingers now bent and crumpled against its palm.

“I wish everyone was here with me.”

Nothing happened.

Remus shook it, like realigning batteries in a flashlight. “Hey, stupid thing, I wish everyone was here with me right now!”

The paw remained unmoved.

“No, no, this isn’t-“ Remus clutched his head, fingers ripping the hair from his scalp. “This isn’t right!”

He threw the twisted paw against the wall. It slammed into the white blankness and fell to the floor with a soft ‘pat’.

“I’m not supposed to be alone! There’s no point if-“ He roughly dragged his sleeve across his face, glittering glass sequins cutting deep.

“Bring them back, you stupid thing!” He roared at the paw.

It lay on the floor, all five fingers curled and broken, utterly still.

“Fucking useless-“ Summoning his Morningstar, Remus swung it once, before hooking over the back of his neck. “Dumbass monkey’s got another hand. He better be ready to lose it, or I’m breaking more than just his fingers!”

The foliage still lay in a path of destruction through the jungle of the imagination. Remus swung his mace through the surviving plants anyway, causing aged trees to come crashing down, and crushing millions of delicate sprouts and flowers.

The temple still lay in ruins, with the burnt remains of the monks crawling around in disembodied clumps of flesh. A withered zombie hand inched across his path, and Remus sidestepped to grind it under his heel.

The ascent up the brainstem tower was made marginally more difficult by the rubble accumulated on the staircase from his last visit. However, Remus was more than used to climbing over his own messes to let that slow him down. 

The top of the tower was just as boring and gilt as he remembered, even with all his aesthetic improvements on the decor.

“Where are you, you damn dirty ape?” Remus roared, mace falling from his shoulder to drag more furrows into the floor.

The mummified ape was just where he left it too, sitting on the dais, the blood encrusted stump of one arm stretched out, while the other arm was tucked away into the folds of it’s zombie monk robes.

Remus stomped up to the dais and seized the hidden arm.

“All right, I wish that-“

But when he pulled the arm free of the cloth, there was no hand. The arm ended in a stump, much like its fellow. However, instead of drying blood stains, a seven-pointed scar marred the withered wrist.

“What the fuck?” Remus growled, twisting the stump this way and that. “Where’s your other fucking paw?”

He let go of his mace’s handle, and it clanged to the floor. He pulled aside the folds of cloth, revealing a decaying monkey dong and beach bod, but no other hand.

“Fucker!” Using both hands, he shoved the body off the dais. It clattered to the floor like driftwood. In an instant Remus was upon it again, teeth bared,

“Do I have to use your feet, you fuck?” He wrenched a foot from its crossed, seated position, hearing the ape’s ancient knee snap.

“I wish Janus was back!” He waited, but the monkey’s paw did not move.

“Come on!” Remus bashed it against the floor. ”Guess we’ll have to do this manually!”

He grasped a toe between his fingers. “Give me back Janus!” SNAP. “Virgil!” SNAP SNAP. “Nerdy Wolverine, hell, I’ll even take the killjoy!” SNAP SNAP.

He tossed the spent paw away, fingers broken and mangled. Seizing the monkey mummy, Remus shook it. It flopped in his grip like an unraveling doll as the dust keeping its joints in place came free.

“Give me back my FUCKING BROTHER!”

His vision blurred, as if he were sitting at the bottom of the ocean, watching the rescue boat float past. The corpse in his arms grew heavier, and he let it drag him to the floor.

“Please.” His breath hitched in his throat, and not even in the fun way. “I just want them back…”

…

“Remus, what the hell are you doing here?”

Remus felt a hand touch his shoulder. Instinctually, he reared back, sharpened teeth snapping. The yellow-gloved hand pulled back, just in time to save itself a lost finger.

Remus opened his eyes. He was crouched in a near fetal position, head bent low over his folded knees, right in the middle of the tower’s top pavilion. In front of him, the eternal hindbrain ape grinned, its single intact hand outstretched.

“Remus!” This time Janus kicked him rather than risk a hand. “Get up! Come on! You’re not supposed to be here!”

He stood up, red eyes glaring in suspicion at the mummified monkey. Its grin was definitely wider than before.

“Come on!” Janus grabbed his upper arm, and pulled him down the twisting spiral stairs that led to the top of the tower. Not a speck of stone was out of place.

“What the hell just happened?” Remus said, allowing Janus to lead him, while he stared back.

“The only thing you’ll find this close to the subconscious are lies,” Janus said, steps quickening. “Now come on. I don’t want you breaking anything!”

“But-“

Janus pulled him through the temple, decaying monks shambling about their daily un-lives, watering flowers and tending fruiting orchards. No bodies splattered across the mosaics, no gore washing over the floor.

“Jannie-bean, what’s, hey-!”

Janus pulled him out of the temple, whose archway was still intact, out into the jungle and leaves. He waved a gloved hand, and a yellow brick road appeared amid the foliage. Remus barely had time to appreciate the fool’s gold before Janus was dragging him along. The path only existed a step front and back in either direction, but Janus followed it unerringly, dragging the intrusive thought behind him.

“Reckless!” Janus spat. “You could have- You’re in so much trouble!”

“Hey, DD, hold up a second!” Remus dug in his heels, soles of his boots turning into iron spikes, which stabbed deep into the earth.

Janus’s arm nearly dislocated at the abrupt stop in momentum. He turned, lips pulled back in a snarl.

“What-“

The words were lost as Remus threw his arms around the other’s neck, and squeezed. “I’m glad you’re not…gone or whatever,” he said, pressing his face to the top of the other’s hat.

Janus beat at his shoulder with a fist. “Remus- breathe-! Let-“ His struggles gained a new fevered pitch, as Remus’s affection drew him closer.

“I would be so bored without you and the rest of the brainy bunch!”

Janus jammed a fist into the side of Remus’s ribs, forcing the intrusive thought to let him go. Gasping for air, Janus held the other side back with a hand, to stop from being ‘hugged’ again. 

“We, hah, don’t have time, hah, for one of your, hah, hypotheticals! Thomas has been trying to summon you for the last five minutes!”

Remus blinked, his shock rendering him pliant enough for Janus to continue pulling him out of the jungle. “He what?”

“Getting out of there is the worst,” Janus said, as the duo burst free of the foliage. He whirled around, plucking stray leaves from Remus’s hair, and straightening his collar. “Now don’t blow this! Just-” He patted Remus on the shoulder with both of his hands - “Just don’t start with everything all at once. Ok? Let’s go!”

In a moment, Janus pulled them both into Thomas’s living room. Roman was disgruntled at having to share his favored corner with two ‘dark’ sides, and took a step towards Patton. Virgil glowered at them from his corner, and Logan stood ramrod straight with his arms folded behind his back.

Thomas looked up from his laptop at their arrival, eyes brightening. “Remus, I was actually thinking about that thing you mentioned before, about a moat full of heads? I think we might be able to use it, as like, a nightmare scene for the Gay Disney Prince script.”

“Joan would like it,” Patton said. His smile, while not up to his usual happy voltage, was a restrained sort of understanding. 

Remus blinked, not used to a smile of any wattage being shined on him.

“Uh,” said Remus, intelligently. “Really?”

Logan spoke up from his usual spot near the kitchen. “It is only logical that any threat the protagonist in the script faces hold some true elements of terror, otherwise the audience will not be invested in seeing him succeed.” 

“Your idea gave me the creeps,” Virgil volunteered, from his place by the stairs.

“Indubitably.” Logan adjusted his glasses. “While Roman has many creative strengths, horror is not one of them.”

“Alas, it is true.” Roman held a hand to his chest, the other cast to the ceiling dramatically. “I can gilt a castle in gold, and defeat the most fearsome of monsters-” his hands dropped to cross over his chest, and he cocked his head at his brother - “But you have a true, shall we say, gift for the eternally horrible.” His lips twitched in a less than unfriendly smile. “Which I suppose has its uses.”

Remus stared around at the assembled parts of Thomas...the other parts of himself really. Each one watched him, some expecting horror, others with hesitant interest, all for him. It was-

Janus pulled sharply on Remus’s arm, drawing him out of his reverie.

“Right!” Remus said, rubbing his hands together. “The first thing I’ll need is a french dictionary, and a blow torch-”

“That is not in our budget,” Logan said.

“And dangerous!” Virgil and Patton said, near simultaneously.

Remus stuck out his tongue. “Fine, an octagenarian worth of birthday candles then-”

Thomas snorted out a laugh. “I think we have some leftover from Joan’s birthday that will work.”

“Fantastic!” Remus’s grin was incandescent. “This is gonna be SO MUCH FUN!”

...


End file.
